Sooner or later it happens to most long-running bands: the all-grown-up, sober-but-wiser album. That’s what “Stone Temple Pilots” turns out to be. “I’m getting old and my money’s been spent,” Scott Weiland, 42, sings in “Samba Nova,” a Brazilian-tinged ballad tucked onto the album’s deluxe version.

For its first studio album since 2001, Stone Temple Pilots reconvened after Mr. Weiland dallied with a solo career and a supergroup (Velvet Revolver, with ex-members of Guns N’ Roses). In the 1990s Stone Temple Pilots were the grunge-come-lately band that blatantly imitated Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Alice in Chains. The band thrived initially, with blanket radio play and multimillion-selling albums. Its music — by the brothers Dean and Robert DeLeo on guitar and bass and Eric Kretz on drums — had a surly momentum and churning midrange guitars, while Mr. Weiland’s lyrics simplified grunge enigmas to be more direct in songs like “Sex Type Thing.”

Mr. Weiland also garnered rock-star notoriety for troubles with crack cocaine, alcohol and heroin (including jail time for heroin possession during the ’90s). His problems become song fodder in “Between the Lines,” the new album’s first single. “I like it when you talk about love,” he sings. “You always were my favorite drug/Even when we used to take drugs.” He repeats that last line, so no one overlooks the past tense.

Stone Temple Pilots can still trot out the grunge. But the old long-suffering snarl sounds strained in “Peacoat” and in “Take a Load Off,” which draws on Pearl Jam’s shifting meters, Alice in Chains’ vocal harmonies, and lyrics mentioning an older generation’s retail haven: “the record store.”

“Stone Temple Pilots” is the band’s first self-produced album, without the Pearl Jam producer Brendan O’Brien, and the music reaches back before the ’90s. The band sets aside grunge power chords for blues-rock riffing by way of Guns N’ Roses, Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin in “Huckleberry Crumble” and “Hazy Daze.” It turns to glam-rock in “Hickory Dichotomy,” with a spoke-sung vocal à la Lou Reed (or David Bowie’s take on Lou Reed). And the band comes up with straightforwardly romantic power pop in “First Kiss on Mars” (hinting at Weezer) and folk-rock in “Cinnamon,” which simpers, straight-faced, “You’ve got to be the prettiest girl I’ve ever witnessed in the whole world.”

In its heyday Stone Temple Pilots brought swagger and darkness to its second-tier grunge. Now the band has returned from its hiatus with less of a musical identity and blander tidings. In “Dare If You Dare,” a glam-rock march, Mr. Weiland gripes about the swine flu scare, then heads for a big chorus: “Hope for the better/Dare to believe.” It’s supposed to be inspiring, but it just sounds dutiful. JON PARELES

MARINA & THE DIAMONDS

“The Family Jewels”

(Chop Shop/Atlantic)

Dissatisfaction and petulance animate Marina Diamandis, the young singer-songwriter behind Marina & the Diamonds. Every song on her debut album, “The Family Jewels,” is a sharp-tongued gripe, delivered in a grand, swooping voice. Taken in one big lump, though, it’s tough to suss out where preternatural wisdom stops and paranoid fantasy begins.

The sound is new-wave cabaret, shiny but distant, with military-stomp piano often setting the tempo. “Oh No!” even has some of the industrial clang of early Depeche Mode. Throughout, Ms. Diamandis sings with peculiar vigor — on “I Am Not a Robot” she’s in debt to Regina Spektor and elsewhere to Kate Bush. Sometimes she breaks character; on “Hermit the Frog” she stops the song to cackle a bit in the background.

That’s a rare moment of fun, though; mostly Ms. Diamandis doesn’t let herself get comfortable. She’s strongest on the songs that nod, obliquely or otherwise, to fame, which she courts like a third grader: by talking down to it. “Girls” appears to take a swipe at prefab British pop groups like Girls Aloud: “Their mothers must be proud/Making money off our insecurity and doubt.”

“The Outsider” is about the perils of being watched, and the mistrust it breeds. “People are connecting, don’t know what to say/I’m good at protecting what they want to take,” she sings. “Just because you know my name/Doesn’t mean you know my game.”

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The self-doubt begins much earlier, though, with “Are You Satisfied?,” the album’s first song, which opens with nail-biting and nerves: “I was pulling out my hair the day I got the deal/Chemically calm, was I meant to feel/Happy that my life was about to change?”

If she’d figured out how, there might not have been any songs to show for it. JON CARAMANICA

STEVE LACY

“November” (Intakt)

Steve Lacy plays the soprano saxophone in a little statelier manner than usual in “November,” a recording from a solo concert performed in Switzerland in November 2003. By the third track you hear a small sound of struggle before some of the notes. The notes themselves, though, are almost physically beautiful, in his usual style: clear, dry and concise, coming in with a tiny shake of vibrato at the end. Sometimes he chooses a spot for a long tone that he makes resonate through the hall, moving the direction of the horn to create a phasing effect, and surrounding it with rests.

He is dying. Mr. Lacy had been diagnosed with liver cancer a few months before the concert, and slipped away the following June, at the age of 69. Once you figure out the chronology of his illness, you might think to look up a solo record from when he was well. There are more than 20 of them, but if you choose, say, “Actuality,” from 1995, you can cross-reference one song, “The Door.” The earlier example is faster and more vigorous, but in 2003, you’re not necessarily missing that. The later version isn’t sad or embarrassing; he’s not trying and faltering. He’s fully inhabiting the dimensions of the energy he has left, and he still sounds like himself.

Starting in 1972 Mr. Lacy developed his solo-saxophone playing into a regular sideline. (It had been done before — by Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Sonny Rollins and Anthony Braxton, among others — but not often.) He wasn’t into stamina shows and power-drill arpeggios; playing his own songs, with simple-sounding, singsong melodies, he went into them methodically, investigating modes and intervals and texture, moving through at a saunter. He could pull off a 75-minute solo saxophone performance with reserved and evenhanded grace, as if it were an improviser’s normal activity.

There was always a little background pathos or gravity in his music, maybe learned from playing early jazz with older musicians like Pops Foster and Red Allen in his teens, and with Thelonious Monk when Mr. Lacy was 25. But he wasn’t a sentimentalist. Ritually, he pared himself down. (“Always leave them wanting more,” Monk advised him.) And so he was perhaps ready for a concert like this.

This concert — his last solo performance — is full of tacit allusions to death, as well as a clear one. Three of its songs — “Tina’s Tune,” “Blues for Aida” and “The Rent” — were originally written in response to friends dying. (The record closes with Monk’s “Reflections” — to which Carmen McRae wrote after-the-fact lyrics about looking back over one’s life.) In “Tina’s Tune,” after playing the melody, he sings the words of the haiku on which he based the tune. They were written by Ozaki Koyo, the Japanese novelist, before his own death: “If I must die/Let it be autumn/Ere the dew is dry.”

Mr. Lacy sings shakily and exhales noisily between each line, either from grief or fatigue. Unusually, for him, he’s showing his cards. Then he gets back to business. (Available by mail order and download from www.intaktrec.ch, or by mail order from www.cadencebuilding.com.) BEN RATLIFF